This sets us on a path to find cases of common ailments—coughing, vomiting, sore throats, jaundice, worms, lychee nose, and Wind rash—that afflict men and women, boys and girls alike. I believe a woman will be able to use my treatments to help the boys and men in her household if a male doctor isn’t available or if her family can’t afford one. Meiling and I are so engrossed that before we know it, the candles have burned down.
Over the coming weeks, Meiling and I continue to pore through my notebooks. Once we’ve identified the cases that illustrate everyday problems and the ways to treat them, we turn to what will make this project unique among all medical books ever written. Meiling is indispensable—encouraging me, questioning me, and sometimes rejecting my ideas. With her counsel, I narrow the list down to thirty-one cases, many of which are related to monthly moon water, pregnancy, the effects on the body from childbirth, nursing, and menopause. Once the cases are selected, Meiling retreats, saying, “Only you can write the introduction.”
With that, she leaves me to my thoughts, brush, ink, and paper. I understand I must act servile and self-effacing before men—other doctors, especially—so I adopt a humble yet confident tone. I begin with the history of my family. I, Tan Yunxian, am descended from generations of respected and acclaimed imperial scholars. I go on to note the high ranks achieved by my great-grandfather, grandfather, uncle, and father. Then I recall my childhood: Grandfather Tan noted my precociousness and suggested that I learn “his” medicine, but my greatest teacher was Grandmother Ru, a hereditary doctor of great skill and wisdom. At fifteen, my hair was pinned up and I married out. I suffered from maladies of qi and Blood. When doctors treated me, I considered their prescriptions, deciding for myself what would and wouldn’t work.
* * *
The following spring, Meiling and I sit on the terrace of the Hermitage. I wear a silk tunic dyed in mulberry juice, a sleeveless jacket of cerise brocade embroidered with gold and silver threads, and a pleated skirt in midnight blue. Meiling’s dress is colorful and bright—the gaudy pink of crabapple blossoms, the extravagant green of plantain leaves, and the joyful red of New Year—to befit her status as a midwife. A copy of Miscellaneous Records of a Female Doctor sits on a table between us, having just been published, on the sixteenth day of the third lunar month in the fifth year of the Zhengde emperor’s reign. Around us, newly sprouted leaves shiver on their boughs and blooming peonies scent the air. The girls of the household pursue different activities based on their ages. They play guessing games, do puzzles, embroider, sew, pluck at instruments, practice their calligraphy, and recite from the classics. Farther away in the garden, two little boys fly a kite. Another group of boys races along the garden’s pathways, ignoring warnings from their mothers and servants to be careful, until I raise my voice and order them to stop this instant. To reward them for their obedience, I give them each a date. Soon enough, the other boys and girls have gathered around me, so I can dole out the treats I keep for them in my pockets.
As soon as the children leave the terrace, I regard Meiling’s and my paired images in the mirror of the pond’s reflection. A couplet about married couples comes to mind: White-haired, growing old together. The same could be said for Meiling and me. With each passing harvest, Kidney qi weakens. Men start to lose their hair—women too, sometimes. Our teeth seem to grow longer. Our bones become brittle. What were once lines of smiles and laughter turn into marks of regret and grief. Or, sometimes, into grooves of anger or arrogance. But looking at our reflections, I see no loss of qi, though we both recently turned fifty.
I hear the sound of voices. Miss Zhao, Lady Kuo, and Poppy come into view and begin to cross the zigzag bridge to reach Meiling and me. For much of my life I felt alone, but over the years a circle of women came to love me, and I came to love each of those women in return. As Miss Zhao raises a hand to wave, I consider the path my life has taken. I remember my mother on her deathbed, saying, “Human life is like a sunbeam passing through a crack.” I remember when my grandmother visited me in a dream and her prophecy that I would live to reach seventy-three years. If this is to be, then I have lived two-thirds of my life. But who knows, really, how many days might be left for a woman such as myself, and what yet I might do when surrounded by so much beauty and love?
POSTSCRIPT TO THE REPRINT OF MISCELLANEOUS RECORDS OF A FEMALE DOCTOR
My grandfather’s sister was a woman doctor named Lady Tan Yunxian, a wife, mother, and daughter-in-law of high standing. I remember when I was a boy and still losing my milk teeth, seeing my great-aunt treat patients in the Mansion of Golden Light, where I lived and still reside, and in her marital home, the Garden of Fragrant Delights. She was beyond reproach, and she achieved fame in her lifetime for her medical skills, which she applied to rich and poor as a humanitarian art. She lived to be ninety-six, outliving long-believed predictions for an earlier death. She died in the thirty-fifth year of the Jianjing emperor’s reign [1556], having survived the reigns of five emperors and proving she must have been a very good doctor.
It is said that the descendants of a person who saves lives will prosper and thrive, but such did not transpire in this instance. Lady Tan’s son, Yang Lian, died at a young age. Many years later, Lady Tan’s only grandson, Yang Qiao, was beheaded for crimes of a political nature. All his descendants were killed in this purge as well, leaving her without any male heirs to make offerings to her in the Afterworld. Without them, there was no one to see to the preservation of her work either, and her book slowly disappeared from book purveyors. I searched until I met a man who had a copy in his personal library. He lent it to me so I might transcribe her words and have new woodblocks made, allowing the book to be printed and distributed again.
Mysteries remain for this great-nephew. The cures Lady Tan formulated in her old age were said to have been even more inspired than the ones found in her book. Many believe she achieved the wondrous abilities of the greatest practitioners of the past, who could simply look at a person—could see through a person—to discern what was wrong. But if Lady Tan had reached these heights, why did she not record those cases? Did she write them down but choose not to share them? If so, where are those writings now? I worry that a servant or lesser wife in the Garden of Fragrant Delights may have found her notebooks, thought them worthless, and used the pages to cover pickle and sauce jars.
Now, at the time of this new publication, I hope that Lady Tan’s original cases will provide help not just to one village or city but to the multitudes spread throughout the land.
I offer this postscript in the thirteenth year of the Wanli emperor [1585] with one hundred obeisances.
Respectfully,
Tan Xiu
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
During the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, I was, like many people, in lockdown and feeling at loose ends. One day as I was walking past one of the bookcases where I shelve my research books—something I do at least ten times a day—the spine of one of the volumes jumped out at me. I don’t know why, because it was gray with very subtle lettering in a muted tone. I pulled it from the shelf: Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China by Yi-li Wu. I looked at the front material and saw that I’d had the book on my shelf for a decade and had never opened it. I thought, Well, here I am in the middle of a global pandemic. Maybe now’s the time to read this. I sat down right then and began to read. On page 19, I came across a mention of Tan Yunxian, a woman doctor in the Ming dynasty, who, when she turned fifty in 1511, published a book of her medical cases. Curious, I put down the book, went to the computer, looked up Tan, and discovered that her book was still available not only in Chinese but in English as well. I had a copy of Miscellaneous Records of a Female Doctor, translated by Lorraine Wilcox with Yue Lu, the following day. So, within the space of about twenty-six hours, I knew what my next book would be.